At its core, abortion is a philosophical conflict where the values of bodily autonomy and the dignity of human life clash. Understanding the moral weight of abortion requires us to examine a harder question: Is it ever right to end the life of an innocent human being?
Most people agree that it is wrong to kill innocent human life. The Declaration of Independence says life is an unalienable right, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights affirms that “everyone has a right to life” and U.S. criminal laws punish murder as a capital offense.
A fetus is a human, no matter how small
Anti-abortion advocates believe abortion is the killing of an innocent human life. A fetus is a human because it has human DNA and all the characteristics of human life. These characteristics are: cellular organization, response to stimuli, reproduction, development, adaptation, metabolism and homeostasis. A fetus is also innocent because the unborn child did not do anything to justify being killed.
Some abortion rights advocates assert that if an unborn child does not have a heartbeat or cannot maintain a heartbeat on its own, the unborn child is not alive. Five to six weeks into pregnancy, the unborn baby develops a heartbeat, so that argument would not stand after that mark.
This argument also dehumanizes the 3 million people worldwide who cannot maintain a normal heartbeat on their own. This includes those who rely on pacemakers and those who have received heart transplants. Tying the value of life to the ability to maintain one’s own heartbeat excludes a lot of people who many consider alive.
Thomson’s violinist hypothetical
One of the most widely cited arguments by abortion rights supporters is the violinist hypothetical from American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson.
In this hypothetical, a person wakes up unwillingly connected by tubes to a famous violinist. If she unplugs herself, the violinist dies. Thomson concludes that it is not immoral for the person to unplug herself from the violinist because the violinist has no rights over another person’s body. Therefore, the argument sustains that abortion is permissible, even if the fetus is a person, because the fetus has no rights over the mother’s body.
The violinist case is a poor analogy to pregnancy. Except in cases of rape, the two people involved in consensual sex know that it could result in pregnancy. The person in the violinist hypothetical did not consent to being hooked up to the violinist.
A mother’s responsibility
American philosopher Dr. Perry Hendricks challenged Thompson’s reasoning in his essay “My body, not my choice.” Hendricks argued that Thomson’s reasoning fails because there are scenarios where the state can rightfully coerce a person to give their body for another’s survival.
Hendricks offers a scenario where a mother has no food for her newborn except her own breastmilk. If she refuses to feed the baby despite being fully capable, this is viewed as immoral and legally punishable. He further imagines a woman who gives birth alone in a remote cabin with sufficient supplies and the ability to produce breastmilk; if she refuses to feed her child, leading to the baby’s death, society would justly regard this as neglect.
Hendricks concludes, “If the state should coerce mothers into feeding their infants, it should (very likely) also coerce pregnant women into continuing to sustain their fetuses.”
Mothers have a unique responsibility toward their unborn children because of the special mother-child relationship and because the mother is the only person capable of maintaining the viability of her child until birth.
The anti-abortion rights position is best encapsulated by a line from Dr. Seuss’s “Horton Hears a Who:” “A person’s a person no matter how small.”
No human’s value should depend on their number of cells or their location inside or outside of the womb. This is a fundamental civil rights issue, and one that our Declaration explicitly names: the right to life.